Life has always been a roller coaster for CIOs, with the rapid digital disruption and challenges to modernized data protection has extensively tailored their business roles. In an interview with ETCIO.com, Ripu Bajwa, Country Manager-Data Protection Solutions at EMC discusses the data protection readiness of the enterprises to meet the challenges of cloud, big data, and mobile devices.

What are the challenges in the data protection that Indian businesses are dealing with?Organizations are getting better at protecting themselves against traditional threats to data, however, new threats mean that, despite progress, more businesses are losing data than before. The EMC 2016 Data Protection Index Survey identified the following three major challenges to modern data protection:

1. Threats to Protection Data: Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of businesses surveyed had experienced data loss or unplanned systems disruption due to an external security breach and that number increased to over one-third (36 per cent) when taking internal breaches into account. In India, 46 per cent of businesses suffered unplanned system downtime and/or data loss due to an external or internal security breach.

2. Threats to Data in the Cloud: More than 80 per cent of survey respondents indicated that their organizations will run at least part of eight key business applications in the public cloud in the next two years; yet less than half said they protect cloud data against corruption and less than half against deletion. More than half said they already run their email solution in the public cloud.

And, overall, respondents already had, on average 30 per cent of their IT environments based in the public cloud. In India, on average 34 per cent of organizations have their IT environment in the public cloud and more than 60 per cent organizations believe that not all their data stored in the cloud is protected.

3. Evolving Protection Needs: Nearly half (54 per cent) of organizations surveyed in India are not very confident they could fully recover their systems or data in the event of data loss or unexpected systems downtime. And confidence also suffers when it comes to data center performance, with only 42 per cent declaring they are confident that their solutions will be able to keep pace with the faster performance and new capabilities of flash storage. Moreover, 83 per cent think that their organization's current data protection solution will not enable them to meet all future business challenges.

How is data loss and downtime owing to the inability to manage the data deluge impacting businesses?Most business professionals are so busy dealing with everyday challenges and managing fires that there's hardly ever a time to recognize progress. However, Indian enterprises are making progress protecting their data from traditional risks.

Enterprises recognize that data loss represents a business risk. Both monetary value and the negative effects on operations are extremely significant. In many cases, corporate operations can be so adversely affected that companies feel the need to mention the risk in regulatory filings and shareholder reports.

There are some major impacts of data loss. Data may be unrecoverable. In this case, important business records may be lost forever. Any business process that is dependent on that data will now be significantly hindered. Next, data may be recoverable but may require considerable time to restore. Finally, while data is unavailable, either permanently or temporarily, applications not directly related to lost data may fail. This is especially true of relational databases that reference other databases.

Less than one-fifth (18 per cent) of the Indian organizations said they were confident that their data protection solutions will meet their future business challenges. Indian enterprises lost 4 TB of data in a year with the average cost of data loss US$ 1,140,000.

What are the best practices that Indian CIOs and CISOs need to adopt? There are certain practices that the Indian CIO's and CISOs need to adopt to protect their business from data losses. Against hacking: The key to protecting data from accidental loss is by creating protection copies but sometimes the deliberate attempt of the hackers may take down the business and can attack those protection copies too. For even more protection, businesses can leverage advanced data protection solutions and separate copies of their data from the network.

Protecting Data: The survey also revealed that 62 per cent of the Indian organizations are currently protecting cloud data against corruption and less than 50 per cent are protecting it against deletion because they believe that their cloud provider protects their data for them. If an employee accidentally deletes files or introduces a virus, that's generally not covered by a cloud provider. 90 per cent of businesses are also using the cloud as a target for their data protection.

Flash Environments: 2016 being the "Year of All Flash", where, for most primary storage, businesses are going to find that it's more cost effective for them to choose an all-flash array over traditional disk-based storage, this can pose a problem for unprepared organizations.

How EMC's Isolated Recovery Solutions protects the valuable data from cyber-attack?EMC has launched a new Isolated Recovery Solutions™ line to help organizations "air gap" a protection instance of their data from the networked enterprise. The solutions line is designed to enable businesses to create a safer room for their most valuable data, isolating it from networked systems that could be compromised in a cyber-attack. If needed, the isolated instance of protection data can be scanned and restored safely within minutes, offering a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) superior to tape-based backup.

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